Virginia Tech: Free Will in a Broken World
I am a college professor. The day of the Virginia Tech shootings, my students and I were all unnerved by this tragedy that had happened in a place much like ours, a place where students and faculty alike would have felt safe, until the unthinkable started to happen. A few students joked nervously about what we’d do if someone started shooting in our class. Would we be able to squeeze through the windows to escape? Another asked, “Professor… what do you think about all this?”
Looking to me for an insight. Looking for help in understanding what had happened, to students like them and professors like me. What could I say?
I’ve been thinking about this tragedy on and off over the last couple of days, reading news articles about it and thinking about how people are reacting. People are stunned, but not just by the death toll itself. Thirty-two deaths in one incident has its own weight to it, but if the victims of Virginia Tech had died in a collapsed building from an earthquake, for instance, it would not feel the same. There would be deep sorrow, but not this sense of horror.
What makes the events so calamitous, I think, is that we are looking at real evil. A human being chose to kill and kill again, in a seemingly random way. It eludes categorization. It wasn’t killing out of frustrated passion, or revenge for a bad grade or a social slight blown out of proportion. It was just – killing. Shooting the known and unknown with equal, chilling, deadly intent.
Many of the newspaper reports I’ve seen have focused on Seung-Hui Cho’s disturbed mental state. Was he mentally ill? If he was, did he choose to kill? Or was it an expression of the disease, like a cough or fever, or an involuntary twitch? Can we say that he killed, or was it a pathology in his brain acting out in real time? If we want to, we can redefine what happened until evil isn’t evil any more; until evil is dysfunction writ large.
In some ways, such an explanation for this tragedy is a relief. It brings a little bit of tortured sense to what is otherwise almost impossible to think about.
It also lets us off the hook for really facing the questions of choice. If we do not have free will, then our choices do not really matter. It also means that we can reassure ourselves that we are not like those horrible people who do bad things. They are the sick people, the defective people; we can distance ourselves from them.
But there’s a catch. Giving an explanation for acts of evil means that the same explanation works for acts of good. If Cho was not truly responsible for his actions, due to mental illness or some sort of dysfunction, then in all honesty we have to extend that explanation to other acts. If Cho didn’t truly choose to do this unspeakably evil act, then neither did Professor Liviu Librescu truly choose to do his incredibly selfless act, giving his life in order to hold the door long enough for his students to escape.
It would feel wrong, horribly wrong, to discount that act of self-giving by saying that it was just due to a good upbringing, or social conditioning, or Darwinian impulses to preserve the younger members of the species, or to random neurons firing. And it should feel wrong, because that explanation would take away the essence of that act: it was a freely willed choice, and it was a choice for good.
We recognize (or should recognize) Prof. Librescu’s act as one that was profoundly good. It reaches us in that part of our heart that says: This is how we ought to behave. I might or might not have the courage to actually do it, but I know that this is what I should do.
In order to choose good, it must be possible to choose evil. That’s hard to accept, because… well, because evil is wrong. It doesn’t fit; we don’t want it to fit. In an intuitive way, we recognize this as evidence that the world is not the way it is supposed to be. The world that includes the Virginia Tech killings is a broken world.
There are consequences to recognizing that the world is broken, that we, as human beings, are broken. One of them is that we have to accept that each of us carries the potential for evil as well as the potential for good. You. Me. Anyone. That’s hard – but that’s what makes our choices meaningful.
Why did Cho choose evil? That’s a different question, one I can’t begin to answer. But as we attempt to come to terms with this horrible act, let’s not lose track of the fact that he did choose. It’s only in that context, of Cho’s choice to turn away from the good and embrace the evil, that we can recognize Prof. Librescu’s profound rightness of bravery, self-sacrifice, and love. And the necessity of our own choice, again and again and again, to choose the right and reject the wrong, in small ways and, perhaps some day when we least expect it, in the largest way, with our very lives. I profoundly hope that I am never in a situation like that tragic day at Virginia Tech, but if I am, I pray that I will be given the grace to choose rightly.
Related posts:
Dr Holly Ordway came to Christ through reason, in the pursuit of truth. "In your hearts honor Christ as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 15).
She writes about her journey from atheism to orthodox Christian faith in her book "Not God's Type: A Rational Academic Finds a Radical Faith" (Moody Publishers).
